The next time you need to setup an online payment system, definitely check out Stripe.com.

I just discovered them today and am quite impressed. It's incredibly simple to use and eliminates the need to setup separate merchant accounts and payment gateways. IMO, it's a much better option than Paypal or Authorize.net.

Ye, stripe has excellent feedback from all areas. They are often featured on Hacker News (i believe they were a Y Combinator startup)

i've been using fastspring.com ( saasy.com ), which is more expensive, but i thought that was because they handled the merchant account and everything for you. i pretty much do nothing but set up the products, build a store template to match my site, and integrate all the notifications (btw paypal IPN notifications are a disaster to use). what i like about fastspring is that i can accept paypal payments as well as normal cards, with no separate configuration. they handle it all and i just manage everything through the web dashboard

i dont know how stripe can charge 2.9% without having a merchant account. some of the more reputable payment solutions such as braintree charge the same but they require a merchant account

ill have to look more into stripe

edit;
i guess stripe doesnt give you the store functionality, just the api to accept payments. fastspring is more of an all-in-one solution

I too used fastspring.com for selling Slice and I thought it was a great service for my use case of accepting payments in exchange for license keys.

greg_nice, yeah I really don't know how they do it either, but they definitely do. Also, they don't charge for failed transactions, there's no setup fee, their API is incredibly simple, they have libraries in Python, Java, PHP, and Ruby, the list goes on and on.

Let me ask you guys this, what do you think about web sites that use Paypal and have the Paypal button?

Idk why, but for whatever reason I think it looks "low class" for some reason. Thats partly why I love Stripe -- it's so flexible and can be seamlessly integrated with your site.

Yeah this is correct, but that's exactly what I was looking for. I need it for a totally custom platform.

I don't know whether it's a good or bad thing, but I don't use 3rd party ecommerce software, shopping carts, CMS's, etc. I much prefer building my own so I know precisely what it does and how it works.

paypal buttons seem to me to be "low class" too; its just a perception thing but part of branding is perception

but many people like to pay with paypal, thats why its nice that fastspring offers that option during checkout. you can see my checkout process here:
http://www.stackandtile.com/sat/buy

when you click through it sends you to their server, so i dont have to worry about SSL or anything. i just set up a product / price / description in the dashboard, and give them a quick html template with my header and they do everything. i dont have to build the forums for the store or any of that. i give them license keys and they handle the auto emails. if i need to do more custom stuff then i just set up a php file to grab the notification of a completed transaction

but its quite a bit more expensive than stripe thats why i was curious

Fastspring is not as cheap as some other options (~5% per sale iirc) but it was definitely worth it for me for the reasons you outline. They handle so many of the details for you, have basic analytics integrated, allow you to do coupons/sales/promotions, automatically handle fulfillment etc etc. Really great service for independent software vendors IMO.

With Stripe and Square I'm pretty much set on everything. I absolutely love the direction online payments are going. Will still check out Fastspring anyway for simple solutions.

I'm a gigantically humongous big fan of Stripe. I'm rooting for that company all the way. It's so nice to see a company solve a legitimate problem so well. Death to PayPal!

I've been using New Relic to monitor my app performance and server stats on my LAMP boxes. I absolutely love it, and you get a free "data nerd" shirt if you try out their trial (no CC required) product. Server monitoring is free no matter what, and totally worth it. Easy installs (I used the PHP agent and apache webserver).

They give a $25 GC to people who sign up under an affiliate link, so if you're interested, PM me and I'll give you a link. Full disclosure: I get a $25 GC if you use my link too. You don't get anything extra if you sign up without a link, but everyone is sensitive to spammers so I'm not posting the referral link here

But srsly it's really awesome. I'll probably sign up for the cheapest plan (Standard, $24/month if you prepay for a year) when my trial expires. Customer service has been solid too; I've opened a few tickets (user error in setup).

100% a bad thing. It's not even close.

+1...I think the downside was that it's US only. Might have changed by now dunno. Was def the #1 on my list if I ever need online payment.

Either way it's good to know some people ITT have experience with different payment platforms. May need some info on that sometime next year.

My guess would be that they don't mind taking losses for building a customer base. Remember that PayPal pretty much started to grow huge when they offered free 10$ for people signing up or however much it was.

And while we're roughly on topic (HN+PayPal). Some days ago someone linked a PDF conversion of the Peter Thiel lectures on startups. It's 650+ pages long, I read about 150 of it so far and it's a pretty entertaining read.
I really like his ramblings on monopoly and competition since that "love for perfect competition" a pet peeve of mine with economics.

Edit: link
http://klinger.io/post/28064173056/p...s-notes-as-pdf

Stripe looks entirely awesome and I'm itching for it to come over to the UK. They have a dream team behind them as well which is very impressive:
https://stripe.com/about

The one downside I can see is that CC chargebacks will cost you $15 each time, but if you have a low chargeback rate it shouldn't really be an issue.

Anyone know some good sources of info on Google Analytics accounts? We've got a bunch of sites with GA from different people that we would like to bring under some kind of control. What I'm mostly wondering about is if it is possible to add a user to all the sites at once instead of having to touch each site?

Not really relevant to online payments, but Square is also pretty awesome. It allows you to take payments on an iPhone or iPad. Perfect for selling goods at an event. https://squareup.com/

yeah its great that i can set up coupons and limit the coupons per use/day/product etc. a lot of "store" stuff that i really have no desire to implement is already built in and a few clicks i'm up and runnning. (or testing in the sandbox)

I disagree, if you're capable of building it yourself and understand the risks and rewards to doing it your own way I don't see a problem with it. It's a great learning exercise as well.

Using a particular platform like Shoppify is all well and good, but the more you become invested in it the bigger a risk it is to you if they decide to change their pricing, bork things up, go out of businesses etc.

writing your own payment processing code sounds awful tactically, but it also sounds awful strategically.

Been using them since the first public beta. Cannot describe how ****ing awesome it is and how awesome they are.

I suppose I wasn't being very clear. I was only referring to things like tools for managing user accounts. For 100% standard things (like processing payments with Stripe), I definitely don't roll my own. Yesterday I used Stripe's PHP API library and had a test version for making a credit card working in about 10 minutes.

It's a great learning experience. But that doesn't make it a good idea. Especially if you're building a real site. Let's put it this way - I don't want somebody learning how to do secure credit card processing while he's writing the credit card processing that I'm about to use. The vast majority of people writing their own security code (as opposed to using an existing library/framework) are making a big mistake.

And unless you're someone that can write bug-free software writing a complex piece of software just means you get to discover all of the pain points of implementing something complex, re-invent the wheel (often as a square) a number of times, and just generally have a less feature-rich, less tested, more buggy piece of software.

As for the risks of getting locked in - you can spend a fraction of the time it would take to re-implement a feature writing your code in a way to nicely integrate with a 3rd party library for ease of switching later.

Ok, makes sense.

I will probably use Stripe for internal billing projects. Other than that, I'd rather use a fully-functioning third party piece of software.

kyle, what part of stripe is not fully functioning?